Valve

Today Call of Duty: Ghosts will be updated with a collection of "customization packs" that allow the user to see their gear covered with oddities. Supposing you enjoyed the holiday-themed layout for your deadly firearm in Call of Duty: Ghosts at the end of last year, the folks responsible for keeping the game fresh have just what the doctor ordered. Several new packs released this week include Ducky, Inferno, Circuit, and no less than Space Cats.

Jason Holtman, who spent several years working for Valve and was the company's Director of Business Development, took up a job with Microsoft in the latter part of 2013, a move centering around Microsoft's PC gaming efforts. Now, less than half a year later, the company has confirmed Holtman has left the building.

It's a big day for the folks that develop the mech-battle game Hawken as they leave their download-it-yourself space and enter Steam. From this point forward, this free-to-play machine vs machine game will be tied to Steam, complete with in-game purchases and full distribution. Today marks the first patch that will come from Steam - this and all future patches for the game will also come from Steam.

This week the folks at Valve have released Steam Music Beta, a local music service that'll allow you to easily play music while you play games with SteamOS. THis service will be added to any machine running SteamOS, and is automatically added to any build for users working with the Steam Client Beta. To access this bit through the Steam Client Beta, users have only to head into System Settings.

Valve launched its SteamOS a while back as an effort to get its own free computer operating system on the market. SteamOS entered beta and was available for those who wanted to try it out to download in December 2013. The beta OS proved to be popular and early on it was difficult to download due to the glut of traffic trying to grab the 960MB file.

This week the folks at Valve have introduced a new Beta release - the second of two so far, that is - of SteamOS. This operating system is delivered in an ISO file, coming now with the ability to install to non-UEFI systems. This update includes work done by the developers known as directhex and ecliptik who created the system called "Ye Olde SteamOSe".

One of the highest-rated games in history - horror title or not - has been readied for release on the PC in a new edition which brings its oddity back with high-definition graphics in Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition. There's a bit of bonus content here, but for the most part, users will be rolling out with the same environment as before, this time prepared for the newest in new graphics processing power. This title also has a few bits and pieces to add on for those that wish to pre-order it in the weeks before it hits digital shelves.

Each Steam Machine coming to the market later this year will be unique - that's the message we're getting from groups like iBuyPower and Falcon Northwest here in the first month of the year. Speaking with the creators of the SteamOS devices that'll be arriving inside the second half of the year, it would seem as though they've got some time to fill - it's Valve, after all, that'll be deciding when the devices are actually allowed to be released as it's Valve that has to release the final software build and the Steam Controllers that go with the machines for final market readiness. Today we're looking at what iBuyPower is doing, specifically, to make their Steam Machine an ideal release.

If you've seen the NVIDIA SHIELD handheld gaming device working with streaming PC gaming in a home network, you know how it works - potentially - with Steam's Big Picture mode. Now Valve is taking this sort of functionality and pushing it to many devices. At the moment, they're calling this "Steam in-home streaming" a beta, and they're releasing it to developer partners and other odd testers this week.

There’s a bit of chatter surrounding the Valve event series going on this week inside the virtual reality landscape, starting with what’s called SteamVR. This system was introduced in beta just before Steam Dev Days began, and has since been shown by Programmer Joe at Valve to be working in full Beta mode in Steam Big Picture mode with the Oculus Rift developer device. There’s also a Valve-made device being shown at Dev Days for developers to try out for themselves.